


make this chaos count

by kissmeinnewyork



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Loss, Love, Rivalry, Romance, also cliche, but fun all the same
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 20:23:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5305589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kissmeinnewyork/pseuds/kissmeinnewyork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Clara wants to do is pass her Russian Literature module so she can finally write her dissertation. Professor John Smith, however, is seemingly doing everything and anything in his power to stop that from happening. (just your average twelve/clara au.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	make this chaos count

**Author's Note:**

> This is so cliche it hurts, but so fun to write. Hope you enjoy. x

“You  _cannot_ be serious!”

Clara slams the lid down of her laptop with a groan, head falling into her hands. Amy, who is sat on a chair on the other side of the kitchen, instantly looks up from her notes.

“What happened?” Amy asks, eyebrows furrowing. If it was anyone else, she might’ve ignored them. She’s become more attuned to Clara’s feelings lately. She’s more than willing to share her burdens.

There’s a few more seconds before Clara looks up. Her large brown eyes look agitated, irate – almost like she’s going to cry.  _Almos_ t. This is not as good of a reason. “You know how I thought I passed all of last year’s modules?”

Amy nods, chewing the lid of the pen.

“The bloody Russian literature professor just…  _refuses_ to,” she slams her fists angrily on the table-top, “You’d think that I’d done enough to deserve a pass, wouldn’t you? Instead, he’s making me attend his lectures this year. And I can’t  _officially_ pass and move onto my dissertation until I complete them.”

Amy makes a face. “That’s shit.”

“Isn’t it just?” Clara runs a hand across her face, pushing back hair that’s fell into her eye-line. She’d thought she’d done enough to put last year behind her; walking into a hall full of Second Year students who are in her exact position this time last year is just tempting her heart to break all over again. “I’m not even doing Russian literature for my dissertation. I’m doing feminist Victorian literature. What’s the point in putting me through it?”

There’s a clatter by the sink as Amy places an empty mug in it. She turns, leaning by the cabinet, facing Clara. She hums sympathetically. “Some professors are like that. I remember my geopolitics one made me write the same essay six times before he’d let me hand it in. Needless to say, geopolitics was never chosen again.”

Clara makes a sound in the back of her throat that’s like a sob. Her eyelids flicker closed. Amy loosely puts an arm around her, pulling her close to her shoulder.

“Are you sure you’re cool with being back?” Amy asks quietly, “Not deferring for a year?”

Clara’s heart burns in her chest. Her throat feels like it’s crammed with sawdust, grit in her lungs, ash in her bloodstream. Her body is being held together by superglue and will-power and the hope that things will get better. She’s spent the last eight months lost in bedsheets and staring at the ceiling, like the answer to  _why_ everything happened would appear in the constellations of cracks in the plasterwork. She could either spend a further twelve months doing that or she could be  _alive._

Danny Pink is not coming back. It’s time she accepts that.

Clara shakes her head, coming back to reality. She squeezes Amy’s arm. “No – no, I’m fine. I just didn’t expect to be this stressed.”

“Yeah, well – ”

Amy’s phone buzzes in her pocket. She let’s go of Clara’s arm to read it, her lips pursing into a pout.

“Rory’s still in town. He wants to meet me,” Amy’s mouth forms a smile, all perfect white teeth and scarlet red. “You should come with me.”

Clara snorts. “Thanks, Amy, but the last thing I want right now is to be the third wheel.” She gestures towards her laptop bitterly. “I’ve got one hell of a reading list to be getting on with.”

“There’s a Waterstones in town,” Amy pleads, green eyes glittering, “Oh,  _come on._ It’s only coffee. When was the last time the three of us had coffee together?”

_When Danny was alive._

The memory tugs at her skeleton. She hides it by smiling. She’s found she can hide a lot of things with a curve of her lips. “Fine.  _Fine._ But only to get you off my back.”

“That’s my girl!” Amy giggles. She turns to bound out the kitchen, crimson waves flowing behind her, legs that seem to go on forever. Clara ponders that maybe they wouldn't have been friends if they weren't put together in a house in First Year: they're so different, and not just in the physical sense. But she loves her all the same.

She hears her run up the stairs to her room, so Clara's left sitting in the kitchen by herself. It's not so different, she muses, from the last time she was here. The table is still surrounded by mismatched chairs - a tattered one with a velvet cover from an antiques store, three plastic deathtraps that came with the house, a white wooden one from Ikea. The sink is still full of dirty dishes. Not the same ones, she hopes. She doesn't think the control-freak within her can handle  _that._

Then again, everything has undeniably changed. 

She noticed it the minute she let herself in yesterday, the first day of the autumn term, bronzed leaves stuck to her boots with sodden rainwater. It wasn't the bricks or the doors or the furniture; no, they were the same, other than a strange mustard-coloured sofa cushion that turned up on the couch in the living room. No, it was like she was breathing different air. At first it was suffocating, like the knowledge of knowing that their household was incomplete. There’s an empty room in the hallway. She swallowed back the rocks in her throat when she saw the bare mattress and the remnant of a photograph, torn off by a drawing pin.

But, then, it was okay. It was okay.

She sighs, then, words running through her mind. _It’s fine to be sad. It’s fine to be angry. It’s fine to be completely okay._ It’s become her mantra but it still doesn’t feel like the truth.

“Oh Danny,” she murmurs to herself, eyes looking straight through the wall and way beyond. It’s been eight months, but she still misses him.

-x-

One thing that has definitely _not_ changed is Amy and Rory’s conversations. She leaves them debating over corporate corruption despite drinking Starbucks black coffee on the search for a bookshop. She hugs her coat tighter around her – the September winds are surprisingly bitter – and quickly finds her local Waterstones, full to the brim of students who like her have hellish reading lists.

She scrolls through her phone notes and with a grumble finds a list titled _Russian shite._ It’s all the well-known stuff; Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, nothing she hasn’t heard of but nevertheless doesn’t really want to read. She interweaves through crowds of eighteen and nineteen year olds to find the foreign literature section which is, unsurprisingly, sparse.

She loosens the scarf around her neck. There’s something comforting about being round books. She scans the shelves for names she recognises and comes across a copy of Tolstoy’s _Anna Karenina,_ thumbing the pages carefully.  

It’s not the fact that it’s unbelievably long that bothers her. It’s the fact it’s a translation. She doesn’t trust them. She feels a book can only be understood, properly, in its native language. Some words cannot be read in English the way they are in French, Russian, German, Spanish. Language is complex and beautiful, emotions condensed into words that burst like a supernova. Translations are not honest.

“Are you a fan of Tolstoy?”

A distinctly Scottish accent growls from behind her and she turns to see a tall and wiry man, his hair slate-grey and tousled and his hands buried deep in his pockets. His eyebrows are as razor sharp as his stare.

Clara smirks, her voice tinted with the edge of a laugh. “No, not really. Is that bad?”

“Terrible,” he admits and he smiles, “He’s brilliant. He’s more than brilliant. He’s a _genius._ ”

“Debatable,” Clara hums, “No – it’s more compulsory reading. I’m more into Victorian stuff. I have to read Tolstoy for this shitty class I’m doing.”

His stare hardens but the smile doesn’t waver. Clara doesn’t understand his motives. Then –

\- he offers her his hand. Clara’s brow furrows. And – oh. _Oh._

“Professor John Smith,” he introduces, “I teach Russian Literature at the university.”

Clara wants nothing more than to fall through the floor. Her cheeks burn hot and she imagines herself going down, down, down, through the earth and the crust and the mantle and into the core where, right now, she’d happily melt.

The pass grade next to this module is even further away than it was to start with.

She feels like she has to shake his hand. Oh God – has she really just called his class shitty? Right in front of him? Before she’s even sat through one of his lectures?

“Clara Oswald,” she says tentatively, and his eyes light up like he recognises the name immediately.

“Ah, Miss Oswald,” he clicks his tongue, “My referred Third Year. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Well, you’ll know my dissertation is on feminist Victorian literature,” she adds, “And you know I would have passed your class if I wasn’t… _away,_ last year.”

“I don’t just pass students on what other people say about them,” he says and the accent is beginning to grate on Clara, ware her down. “I have to form an opinion. And the only way I’ll be able to do that is if you complete my module. So I’d start by getting on my good side, Miss Oswald. I can guarantee you it’s a lot easier that way.”

His arrogance makes her harden. She scowls, hugging the book closer to her chest. He picks up a copy of a book on the display stand, thumbs through it quickly, before tucking it under his arm. He dresses the way he talks. It’s a haughty, red-lined suit. He looks like a fucking magician.

“See you bright and early Monday morning,” he murmurs, almost to himself, as he glances at another book. “My lecture starts at 9am sharp. Narrative devices in _Anna Karenina._ And I know when someone has googled plot outlines. Those are the people I tend to fail.”

He doesn’t even look back at her. He closes the book on the stand and turns on his heels, heading for the checkout. She immediately loses him behind a lost history student, balancing around twelve books on the Spanish Civil War in his arms.

She almost – almost – laughs, bitterly, to herself. As if coming back to university isn’t a challenge on its own. She now has to face the lecturer from hell, who she’s already managed to insult.

How the _fuck_ is she going to graduate at the end of this year?

 

 


End file.
